Discovering Bill's Barrel

Moving forces you to sort through your possessions -- to sort through your life, really.  You have to decide what's worth taking with you to your new home and what items to give away to someone who will appreciate them more than you.  The stuff that remains is mere clutter to be tossed in the trash bin.  The process is a little like an archaeological dig.

In a week, my family and I will be moving to a new home.  So, for the past month, we've been sifting through our years of accumulated stuff -- the layers of the Newcomer Family Tel.  I've found things I forgot I had ... little pieces of personal history that trigger all sorts of memories.  It can be a lot to take in.  At times, deciding what to keep and what to throw away feels momentous, as if I'm deciding what memories to preserve and what I would just as soon forget.

As l worked my way through the many things on the shelves in our garage, I came upon five banker's boxes that hadn't been touched since I put them there eight years earlier.  Written on the side of each box, in my mother's impossibly neat handwriting, were the words "Bill's Sermons."  It was my dad's "barrel."  Every preacher has a barrel -- a lifetime of sermon transcripts and notes.  When your pastor is struggling for inspiration for the next Sunday sermon, he or she reaches into the barrel, pulls out an old sermon preached at a past church, and re-works it for a new audience. (Occasionally, a lazy pastor will preach a sermon straight from the barrel that hasn't been revised for new listeners. If you hear a sermon filled with references to events from the Seventies, it's a safe bet you're being spiritually fed from the bottom of the barrel.)

"Wow, I forgot all about this stuff," I thought to myself.  I had preserved Dad's barrel, but I had done nothing more with it.  More than twenty years of ministry was stuffed into five boxes on a set of metal shelves in my garage. As I thumbed through the many file folders in those boxes, I realized that I had been given a gift, an opportunity.  Tucked away in these boxes was a chance to re-connect with my father, who had died twenty-five years ago.

Over the last twenty-five years, I've often wondered what advice Dad would have for me about being a good husband to my wife, Dorry or about raising our kids, Wesley and Adrienne.  I've tried to imagine the joy and pride my dad would have expressed when learning that Dorry had been called by God to follow his footsteps into ministry.  No question, I've missed having him in my life, and I'm not foolish enough to think that some boxes of old sermons are going to make up for his absence over the last twenty five years.  But it's good to hear Dad's voice again, and that's what I hear when I read his sermons.  It's a voice worth listening to.  These are sermons worth keeping and sharing.

Enjoy, as I share some sermon snippets with you ... straight from Bill's Barrel.